The government is more concerned with the platforms rather than the games themselves, mainly because newer systems like Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3 allow users to communicate with one another via messaging and chat systems

Gamers may want to be careful about what they say when jumping onto their consoles for an innocent bout of slaying dragons or killing zombies -- the government will be watching.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the U.S. Navy have launched a new research initiative that will explore ways of allowing the government to hack into gaming consoles like the Xbox 360, Wii, or PlayStation 3 to obtain information on gamers.

In 2008, a project called "Gaming Systems Monitoring and Analysis Project" was executed when law enforcement became worried about pedophiles using game consoles to talk to children. Later, law enforcement authorities went to DHS' Science and Technology Directorate in search of help on an instrument that could observe game console data. DHS then went to the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) to find Simson Garfinkel, a NPS computer science professor, to offer a contract to a company that could conduct the research and offer a product.

The U.S. Navy ended up recently awarding the $177,237 contract to Obscure Technologies, which is a computer forensics company based in San Francisco, California. Obscure Technologies will be expected to create new hardware and software capable of extracting data from video game consoles. DHS wants to be able to extract data from both new and used games systems bought on the secondary market as well.

According to DHS, the reason for tapping into game consoles is to find pedophiles, who are using communication resources on game systems to seek out victims, and even terrorists, which DHS believes are using consoles to communicate.

"Today's gaming systems are increasingly being used by criminals as a primary tool in exploiting children and, as a result, are being recovered by U.S. law enforcement organizations during court-authorized searches," said Garfinkel.

The government is more concerned with the platforms rather than the games themselves, mainly because newer systems like Xbox 360, Wii and PlayStation 3 allow users to communicate with one another via messaging and chat systems. This communication is what the government is mainly after.

This new contract has privacy groups wondering if this is just another way that the government can abuse citizens' privacy.

"You wouldn't intentionally store sensitive data on a console," said Parker Higgins, a spokesman for the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), an online privacy group. "But I can think of things like connection logs and conversation logs that are incidentally stored data. And it's even more alarming because users might not know that the data is created. These consoles are being used as general-purpose computers. And they're used for all kinds of communications. The Xbox has a very active online community where people communicate. It stands to reason that you could get sensitive and private information stored on the console."

It's important to note that DHS doesn't plan to hack into the game consoles of U.S. citizens because of privacy-related issues. DHS only plans to peek at consoles from overseas.

"This project requires the purchasing of used video game systems outside of the U.S. in a manner that is likely to result in their containing significant and sensitive information from previous users," said Garfinkel. "We do not wish to work with data regarding U.S. persons due to Privacy Act considerations. If we find data on U.S. citizens in consoles purchased overseas, we remove the data from our corpus."

It came out last year that most commercial copiers, in offices and places like Fedex, libraries, and copy centers, use a hard drive for temporary storage between scanning a document then printing it out. There is no encryption of the hard drive. By the time the investigative news found out, there were literally thousands and thousands of copiers that had been excessed by various offices, including police and banks. There is a company whose business is to buy up these used copiers and then re-sell them, mostly overseas. The investigative news found the Chinese were buying these "obsolete" copiers by the palette load. The news randomly bought a few of these copiers and examined the hard drive. There were tens of thousands of documents, from personal information to one from a police department that had thousands of investigative and criminal prosecution documents, one from a hospital that had thousands of patients' records, banks that had thousands of account records and so on. Kind of interesting.

Pacing in wait of Sony's imminent DOOM!...since 2006

PS4 - The Only Hardcore Gaming Console = All Your Baserape Are Belong To Us

But its still so stupid of them to do this and yet no matter what we say and do. Its going to happen

That's because Britain is a police statist's wet dream. You guys live in an extremely repressive 'progressive' place.

Depressingly, nothing your government aims to do (unsurprisingly) works.. At least, not at the expense of insane amounts of freedom. They're persistent though, they won't let little things like studies or failures get in their way to helping you.

Not that we're setting trends for personal liberties here in the US in the past decade either, mind you.

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